short thick hair, eyes as gray as his hair. I don’t know how to calculate the age of old people. Manuel looks okay from a distance—he walks fast and hasn’t got that hump old men get—but up close I can tell he is older than my Nini, so he must be seventy-something. I’ve dropped into his life like a bomb. I’ll have to walk on eggshells, so he won’t regret having given me shelter.
After almost an hour on the water, passing quite a few islands that appeared uninhabited, even though they weren’t, Manuel Arias pointed to a headland that from the distance was barely a dark brushstroke but up close turned out to be a hill with a beach of blackish sand and rocks at the edge of it, where four wooden boats were drying upside down. He docked the Cahuilla at a floating wharf and threw a couple of thick ropes to a bunch of kids who’d come running down to meet us, and they tied the boat to some posts quite capably. “Welcome to our metropolis,” said Manuel, pointing to a village of wooden houses on stilts in front of the beach. A shiver ran up my spine; from here on in, this would be my whole world.
A group came down to the beach to inspect me. Manuel had told them an American girl was coming to help him with his research; if these people were expecting someone respectable, they were in for a disappointment. The Obama T-shirt I was wearing, a Christmas present from my Nini, wasn’t long enough to cover my belly button.
Unloading the refrigerator without tilting it was a job for several volunteers, who encouraged each other, laughed loudly, and hurried as it was starting to get dark. We walked up to town in a procession, the refrigerator in the lead, then Manuel and I, behind us a dozen shouting little kids, and, bringing up the rear, a ragtag bunch of dogs furiously barking at Fahkeen, without getting too close; his air of supreme disdain clearly indicated that the first to do so would suffer the consequences. Fahkeen, who seemed difficult to intimidate, wouldn’t let any of them smell his butt. We passed a cemetery, where a few goats with swollen udders were grazing among the plastic flowers and what looked like dollhouses marking the graves, some with furniture for the use of the dead.
In the village, wooden bridges connected the stilt houses. In the main street—to give it a name—I saw donkeys, bicycles, a jeep with the crossed-rifles emblem of the carabineros, the Chilean police, and three or four old cars, which in California would be collectors’ items if they were less banged up. Manuel explained that due to the uneven terrain and inevitable mud in the winter, all heavy transport is done by oxen cart, the lighter stuff by mules; people get around on horseback and on foot. A few faded signs identified some humble shops—a couple of grocery stores, a pharmacy, several bars, two restaurants, which consisted of a couple of metal tables in front of a couple of fish shops, and one Internet café, which sold batteries, soda pop, magazines, and knickknacks to the visitors who arrived once a week, carted in by ecotourism agencies, to enjoy the best curanto in Chiloé. I’ll describe curanto later on, because I haven’t tried it yet.
Some people came out to take a cautious look at me, in silence, until a short, stocky man decided to say hello. He wiped his hand on his pants before offering it to me, smiling with teeth edged in gold. This was Aurelio Ñancupel, descendant of a famous pirate and the most necessary person on the island—he sells alcohol on credit, extracts molars, and has a flat-screen TV, which his customers enjoy when there’s electricity. His place has a very appropriate name: the Tavern of the Dead. Because of its advantageous location near the cemetery, it’s the obligatory stopping point at which mourners can alleviate the sorrow of every funeral.
Ñancupel had become a Mormon, attracted by the idea of having several wives, and discovered too late that the Mormons had renounced polygamy after a new prophetic revelation, more in line with the U.S. Constitution. That’s how Manuel Arias described him to me, while the man himself doubled over with laughter, echoed by the crowd. Manuel also introduced me to other people, whose names I couldn’t remember, who seemed too old to be the parents of that gang of children; now I know they’re the grandparents; the generation in between all work far from the island.
So then this fiftyish woman with a commanding air came walking up the street. She looked tough and attractive, with hair that beige color blond turns when it goes gray, done up in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. This was Blanca Schnake, principal of the school, who people call, out of respect, Auntie Blanca. Kissing Manuel on the cheek, the way they do here, she gave me an official welcome in the name of the community, which dissolved the tension in the atmosphere and tightened the circle of nosy bystanders around me. Auntie Blanca invited me to visit the school the next day and offered me free use of the library, with its two computers and video games, which I can use till March, when the kids go back to class; after that the timetable will be more limited. She added that on Saturday they showed the same movies at the school that were playing in Santiago, but for free. She bombarded me with questions, and I summed up, in my beginner’s Spanish, my two-day trip from California and the theft of my wallet, which provoked a chorus of laughter from the kids, quickly silenced by a glacial look from Auntie Blanca. “Tomorrow I’m going to make you some machas a la parmesana, so the gringuita can start getting to know some Chiloé cuisine. I’ll expect you around nine,” she told Manuel. Afterward I found out that machas are a special kind of razor clam found only in the southern Pacific, and that the correct thing to do is to arrive an hour after the time you’re told. They have dinner very late here.
When we finished our brief tour around the town, we climbed into a cart pulled by two mules. The refrigerator was secured behind us, and off we went, very slowly, along a barely visible track through the pasture, followed by Fahkeen.
Manuel Arias lives a mile—or a kilometer and a half, as they say here—from town, right on the sea, but there’s no access to his property by boat because of the rocks. His house is a good example of the region’s architecture, he told me with a note of pride in his voice. To me it looks like all the rest of the houses in town: it rests on pillars, and it’s made of wood. But he explained that the difference is that its pillars and rafters were carved with axes; it has “round-headed” shingles, much appreciated for their decorative value; and the timber used for it is Guaitecas cypress, once abundant in the region and now very rare. The cypresses of Chiloé can live for more than three thousand years, and are among the longest-lived trees in the world, after the baobabs of Africa and the sequoias of California.
The house has a high-ceilinged living room, where everything happens around the imposing black woodstove, which is used to heat the place and for cooking. There are two bedrooms—a medium-size one, which is Manuel’s, and a smaller one, mine—as well as a bathroom with a sink and a shower. There is not a single door inside the house, but the washroom has a striped wool blanket hanging across the threshold, for privacy. In the part of the main room used as the kitchen there’s a big table, a cupboard, and a deep crate with a lid to store potatoes, which in Chiloé are eaten at every meal; bunches of herbs, braids of chilies and garlic, long, dry pork sausages, and heavy iron pots and pans for cooking over wood fires all hang from the ceiling. A ladder leads up to the attic, where Manuel keeps most of his books and files. There are no paintings, photographs, or ornaments on the walls, nothing personal, only maps of the archipelago and a beautiful ship’s clock, its bronze dial set in mahogany, that looks like it was salvaged from the Titanic. Outside Manuel has improvised a primitive jacuzzi with a huge wooden barrel. The tools, firewood, charcoal, and drums of gasoline for the motorboat and the generator are kept in the shed out back.
My room is simple, like the rest of the house; there’s one narrow bed covered with a blanket similar to the washroom curtain, a chair, a dresser with three drawers, and a few nails in the wall to hang clothes on. More than enough for my possessions, which fit easily into my backpack. I like this austere and masculine atmosphere. The only worrying thing is Manuel Arias’s obsessive tidiness; I’m more relaxed.
The men put the refrigerator in its place, hooked it up to the gas, and then settled down to share a couple of bottles